The first legal signature by a woman in the history of Catalonia
On the 16th of April of the year 1044, a woman named Alba wrote and signed a purchase document about what she and her husband were buying. This is the first time --or at least the oldest time that has survived-- where a woman signed a legal document in Catalonia.
Her name was Alba. You can see her signature at the end of the document: "Alba Femina Scripsit", which means "the woman Alba wrote this".
We know she was from the city of Vic, where her father Guibert was a teacher, having moved to Catalonia from Liège (modern-day Belgium). He taught his three sons and three daughters how to read and write, in a time where very few people knew how to, and even less women. He also taught them Latin, since it was a time where Romance languages (the languages that evolved from Latin, in our case Catalan) were not written down yet, they were the language that people spoke, but when it was time to write a document it was done in Latin. We see that Alba used great Latin, as well as an excellent calligraphy; but it's fascinating to see that she used a few of words in Catalan within the text, like era ("threshing floor"), casals ("houses"), coma ("mountain pass" or tiny valley), and puio (modern Catalan: puig; "hill") to describe the location they're buying. This was starting to become common at the time: the text itself was in Latin, but the specifics could be written in Catalan to make sure it was correctly understood.
This is the only document we have from her. But we know a few more things from other documents: she got married to a man named Jobert, they lived in the town of Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer and had three daughters (named Guilla, Adaleds, and Magensburg) and three sons (Guillem, Ramon, and Artall), and from her husband's will we can see what they named everything in their possession: they had a piece of land nicknamed Coma Erma ("Waste Mountain Pass"), a house named Rosta, a cuirass named Claramalla, a horse named Giscafred, a mare called Gaçola, and an hauberk (mail shirt) named Omnia bona (Latin for "All Good").
Photos: Episcopal Archive of Vic / Marta Fernández Jurjo, Tània Alaix. Information sources: research from the book Lletres que parlen: Viatge als orígens del català by Jesús Alturo and Tània Alaix via La Vanguardia.
